Car Dealers

Historically, car dealers have devoted more resources to political contributions than domestic automakers themselves, and that trend continued through 2014, when the industry made more than $10.2 million in donations. Their concerns are largely aligned with those of U.S. manufacturers, but the industry also advocates for many of the same issues as small businesses in general.

Far and away the biggest spender in the industry is the National Auto Dealers Association (NADA), which dispensed more than $2.9 million in contributions in the 2014 election cycle. Of the subset of donations to candidates and parties, 70.5 percent went to Republicans. This is a trend carried throughout the field, which gave 83.8 percent of the contributions it made to candidates or parties to the GOP in 2014. Car dealers generally favored Republicans in the past, but the 2012 cycle marked the biggest lean to the right since at least 1990, with 85 percent of its cash going to conservatives. That may have been in part a reaction to the Obama administration's fuel economy standards. The industry opposes new miles per gallon regulations - especially when coming from the Environmental Protection Agency and not from Congress - and NADA has claimed that prices will dramatically increase, leading to job losses.

The industry's lobbying expenditures in 2015, the last full year for which we have data, were the highest they've been since the Center for Responsive Politics began charting these disbursements in 1998. NADA footed just under $4 million of the $4.8 million bill - the association's largest outlay ever - lobbying predominantly on auto financing. [Read more Background]

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